Franchises that can hardly be adapted as movies

Hi everyone,

ProtoformAl, Shiro and I are three friends who want to share our opinions on video games, movies and books. Most of the post on this blog will be related to the three mentioned topics. Some may be dedicated to a particular franchise or to a single title. Sometime, we may focus on a particular medium. After this quick presentation, let us introduce our first post: Are there some franchises (books or video games) that won't make the transition to the big screen?

Making adaptations of others media is one of the thing the cinema industry really tend to do. It is done for various reasons: to surf on the previous success of the first medium (book adaptation, video games adaptation, etc...), to expose to a greater public a well developed storyline which had a small impact and which deserves a wider audience. We could go on for what reasons can make a story being adapted for the silver screen. But is there a limitation of what can be transferred from another medium to cinema? Are some franchises not suited for a cinema adaptation?

One of the first reasons (and maybe the most obvious one) of difficulty to translate a medium to movie is the complexity of the topic and the wide range of meaningful characters. Movies have a format of around 105 minutes for purpose of distribution in theaters (longer movies can sometime drop the attention of the viewers). So some stories have to many plots and subplots to fit the standard movie format. Let's take for example the Anne Rice Vampire Chronicles, there's around 12 books in the whole series ad it will be impossible to do a single movie to handle all of the different characters and plots. This series to be fully adaptable would requiere several movies. They made two movies based on the first three books of the series (Interview with a Vampire, based on the eponymous first book of the series) which was a success and Queen of the Damned, based on the two following ones, which received less praise from critics and viewers).

Another reason can be the fate of the main protagonist. Major studios tend to give us stories with happy ending (there are some exceptions like Fight Club (suicide attempt of the main protagonist) or Le professionnel (a French movie starring Jean-Paul Belmondo in which he gets shot in the final scene)). Those kind of ending may not be well received by the mainstream audience. It could be risky to adapt those kind of materials.

One other reason may also be the topic of the first medium (mostly if it brings some controversy). Controversy tend to make people uncomfortable. At the moment, no particular franchise come to our head to help us develop a little more about this particular point.

This is all for this first post. Hope you have enjoyed it. More will follow in the future.